With the advent of telecommunications, it has become useful and desirable for enterprises and individuals to employ various forms of sensors and communications devices to monitor the condition and location of certain assets such as portable computing devices. Advances in digital, electronic and wireless communication devices have extended the range and convenience of portable asset monitoring. Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) such as Inmarstat, Iridium, Globalstar, or Msat now increase the accuracy of portable asset location and movement. Such technologies are significant in improving efficiency and economic management of portable assets. Such devices and business practices are well known in the prior art.
Due to the growth of the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and general decrease in costs and sizes of GPS device components, there has been a growing demand for GPS implementation within portable assets. One such area has been portable computing devices. As individuals and enterprises expand the use of portable computing devices such as lap top computers, there has been an increasing recognition of the vulnerability such devices have for theft or loss and the corresponding increase in economic value and corresponding loss when theft or loss occurs. For example, of the more than 10,000 laptops that go missing every month at Chicago O'Hare Airport, approximately only 22% are ever recovered.
A problem in the prior art has been an inability to configure and fabricate GPS devices that were compact enough to conveniently install on portable computing devices. A further problem is the inability to configure an embedded antennae configuration with such a compact GPS device that will reliably transmit such signals usable by a GPS tracking network for device recovery in the event of theft or loss. A still further problem has been a lack of means to configure such GPS devices for simple, rapid and covert installation into existing portable computing devices that will be both efficacious yet difficult to detect and disable by thieves. A still further problem in the prior art is the lack of an enabling system to instruct the installed GPS device in a portable computing device to instruct the computing device to transmit, alter or destroy stored data files to prevent economic loss or breach of privacy rights. A still further problem is the lack of a suitable business method and process to price, acquire and install such GPS devices, concurrent with a method to price and provide a risk management financial instrument to compensate a purchaser for potential the risk of loss and impairments occasioned by the irrecoverable or partial recovery of portable computing devices and data therein installed.
Currently, GPS is a fast-growing field. Cell phones currently have the ability to have GPS on them as do automobiles, which has made GPS products an off-the-shelf product. However, in the present invention, the device's solutions and implementation, and the size of the unit make it unique. What also makes it unique is a novel, computationally based recovery replacement program that utilizes a generated insurance service to mitigate the risks and costs associated with theft and loss of portable computing devices.
Therefore, a first object of the present invention is to disclose a novel and useful GPS device and antennae system that may be covertly and efficiently installed into a portable computing device through the memory slots on the motherboard.
A second further object of the invention is to disclose a novel means to employ specific software (“Silver Bullet software”) in the GPS device that may independently instruct the portable computing device to transmit, alter or destroy data files in the portable computing device to prevent loss of economic value or personal privacy through the unique coding of the Silver Bullet software application.
A third further object of the present invention is to disclose a novel computerized and enabled method to acquire and install such a GPS device and software and to provide a computer generated insurance product to compensate for accidental loss or theft of such portable computing devices.